Unfortunately the odds are nil that effective regulation will reverse this dynamic by first protecting the real economy from predation by the financial & government capture economies in America.

These incentives only appear perversely toxic to the former, not the latter two economies, which depend on them for exponentially disproportionate returns while risk is laid off on others.

Frank is no Pecora. Obama is no FDR.

And Elizabeth Warren is Brooksley Born.

Exactly, MB!

Life insurance is where the customer bets he’s going to die before the life insurance company thinks he is!

If you win, you lose!

(Or, as I used to joke, when a life insurance company writes you about how sorry they are your spouse/parent/whoever died, you may rest assured they mean it from the bottom of their cold calculating heart.)

“ok. let me get this straight. i’m betting you that i’m gonna die, you’re betting me that i’m gonna live. we ante up quarterly and i spend the next three months hoping you win…”

As long as the One is onboard with the Companies’ agenda (more and better ca$hflows) he’ll do fine. If he starts to listen to his own campaign speeches in 2010, though, say bye-bye.

No, I do not think that would be a good thing, because of what would replace Obama. It’s the difference between bad and worse. Have no delusions: as much as Obama leaves to be desired, right now there is nothing better in the wings.

Anything better would get the Wellstone treatment as would the One if he took himself really seriously.

I, for one, don’t think Obama losing is a really bad idea. I don’t generally mind if conservatives lose and I won’t care if he loses. I held my nose and voted for him in 2008 and swore at the time it was the very last time I was going to do that for the Democrats. Nothing that has happened since then has made me change my mind about that. If anything, electing Democrats - just because they’re Democrats - seems less important than ever before no matter how crazy the GOP is.

I would agree if I thought that within the space of an election, a left alternative to Obama would spring up unbidden as from the head of Zeus. Instead, the alternative will likely be some form of right-wing populist, or someone dependent on right-wing populists. Unfortunately, the Lesser of Two Evils still holds. Yes, I know, the LTE is used to keep the left at bay, but there’s a reason why it works—it’s because it’s real.

For me as a member of an unpopular minority, well, there are aspects and motivations of right-wing populism with which I am somewhat sympathetic—they don’t seem to love the bank bailouts—but that doesn’t mean that I don’t fear them as the Greater of Two Evils.

I no longer think electoral politics is going to get us anywhere. I’m more about social movements aimed at pressuring whoever is elected, both in terms of outcome and in terms of giving angry people some place to go other than rightwing populism.

This is true and I agree with it. However, insofar as elections are going to continue to happen and perhaps have consequences, they can’t be completely ignored.

Are you claiming that the fact that the outgoing republican president ceremoniously signed off on agreement that was not yet finalized meant that clinton HAD to sign it? Didn’t Perot run on NOT signing off on nafta? A republican ex-president ceremoniously signing off on an incomplete agreement that hadn’t been voted on by either the senate or the house equates to fait accompli that it must come into law? If you are so dumb to believe that then all I can say is WOW! And somehow in your minuscule mind the fact that a democrat president, a democrat dominated house (that outnumbered the republicans by 82 seats) and a democrat dominated senate (which outnumbered republicans by 12 seats) passed nafta is trumped by a republican ex-president’s ceremoniously signing an incomplete agreement so therefore it is GOP legislation. Another WOW! on that.

The highest family income in history may be true … I wouldn’t doubt if it was … because there was low unemployment during the clinton years. But despite that, and despite the leverage one would think the american workers would have in that situation:

“Both the average wages for non-supervisory workers and the earnings of those in the lowest 10 percent of wage earners,” notes Robert Pollin, “not only remained well below those of the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations, but were actually lower than that even than those of the Reagan/Bush years. Moreover, wage inequality — as measured by the ratio of the 90th to the 10th wage decile — increased sharply during Clinton’s tenure in office, even relative to the Republican heyday of the 1980s.”

http://dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Street0929.htm

A healthy economy, huh? What was the basis of it? A big employer during those years were the internet companies many of which reached crazy stock valuations, but crashed and burned becoz they couldn’t make money. Where did the money come from to blow up the stock market bubble and fund these jobs? A lot of it was the fact that the fed bought into rubin’s “productivity” “miracle” and jacked up the money supply to reflect it. That’s one reason that the stock market doubled in one year and we all saw how much of a true miracle it was when companies with huge valuations crashed and went bankrupt.

The manufacturing jobs began to leave during the clinton administration, but there were other jobs, many of them directly and indirectly produced by the unhealthy stock market bubble, to soak them up.

Free trade agreements and the financialization of our economy had a HUGE part in disempowering the average worker, the average american. clinton had a HUGE part in the rise of both of those factors though idiots like you probably lay that solely on rubin as if rubin fell like an asteroid from the sky into clinton’s cabinet.

It’s not really about history with you as much as thinking … your ability to comprehend instead of imagining things the way you wished they were. I wouldn’t doubt if you were one of those dumbasses from the hillary clinton-loving blog that I got thrown off of. In fact, maybe you are the dumbass that runs it that counts as bill clinton’s achievements fighting off impeachment and winning elections without cheating.

Z

It didn’t begin with Clinton but it sure didn’t end with Clinton or even take a break with Clinton. Production is sovereignty.